first thoughts  Angela Lehman-Rios  

Bright math, science and language arts projects covered tables at the front of the classroom. Parents sat in stiff rows as eighth-graders described how many high school credits students could accumulate at this middle school. Then, they said, in high school they’d be able to start earning college credits.
 
As I listened to the presentation at the school my rising sixth-grader will likely attend, I wondered, “Why?”
 
Why is it so great that my child might be able to start high school with credits already on her record? Why should she worry about nabbing college credit in high school? Just because she can?
 
It’s not that I think there’s no good answer to this “why” question, it’s that I’m concerned students aren’t being encouraged to ask and answer it for themselves.
 
It seemed, as I listened, that academic credits were not that different from any other product in a consumption-driven culture. You want them because—like a Lexus, a tattoo or a subscription to The New Yorker—they say something about who you are. You want them because someone told you they were good to have. You want them because—well, why not?
 
 
Curricular knowledge is a commodity, prepared for the market by textbook publishers, Standards of Learning authors and education administrators. To say this doesn’t diminish the value of “textbook” knowledge, but does prompt the question: what are kids not getting when they spend all their time and energy acquiring it?
 
The skeptic in me says that if my daughter isn’t challenged by regular middle-school classes, instead of consuming more and more curricula fed to her by some invisible, external dictate, she could focus her extra energies on service work, or music practice, or reading for pleasure, or other self-directed projects. Ultimately, she might be better off, having learned how to pursue her own interests.
 
 
As these thoughts swirled through my head, my husband, a teacher, came home deeply impressed after a visit to a Hampton Roads elementary school in a low-income area. About 10 years ago, he said, the school was in shambles with widespread student behavior problems and abysmal pass rates. A new principal managed to turn things around, in large part by reviewing student test scores to help identify ineffective teachers. 
 
I realized that my skeptical attitude toward the acquisition of knowledge is the privilege of someone who already has enough knowledge to provide a comfortable life. Likewise, my thoughts about weaknesses in the system of standardized testing are born of the luxury of not really needing the benefits of such testing.
 
If a child has almost nothing in her knowledge stores—no preschool experience preparing her for literacy, parents who didn’t finish high school, a home in which the only books are poorly summarized versions of Disney movies—then knowledge is one of the most crucial commodities she can acquire.
 
In her article about the Standards of Learning and SOL tests (page 16), Meriwether Delano Gilmore asserts that the SOLs were put in place by dedicated educators who envisioned “an education system where all the children were educated, all were taught to read and given the glimpse of how much brighter a future could be with a diploma in hand.”
 
The Standards of Learning system is only one means to that end. And giving high school credits to middle-schoolers is just one way of challenging young learners.

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